Quotes by Shirley Chisholm

“Little Shirley grew up with a strong sense of her own destiny. Her early heroes were Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony. Miss Anthony, the homeliest of the suffragettes, was o...”

“My grandmother had a fantastic influence in my life. She would always check homework, and she would, each night she would Repeat it to me. And if I didn't stand up straight, she said, Child-this is...”

“It's the same old priority that we have today...Housing. Employment. Health. The same priorities follow black people in these United States time after time after time...the same issues. It's strang...”

“Well, it's being done very subtly in many instances, but our country has definitely moved to the right, there's no question about it, and so you find a kind of what should I say? There's a cutback ...”

“The income for domestics in this country. Domestic workers. Every year we had the increase in income domestic workers never, never fit into the scale of things.”

“Who knows? It took a little black woman, Harriet Tubman, to lead three hundred of her people out of slavery; it required another little black woman, Rosa Parks, to say she was tired of going to the...”

“The movement has, for the most part, been led by educated white middle-class women. There is nothing unusual about this. Reform as movements are usually led by the better educated and better off. B...”

“I did this [ran for president as a Democrat instead of third party] because I feel that the time for tokenism and symbolic gestures is past. Women need to plunge into the world of politics and batt...”

“Few, if any Americans, are free of the psychological wounds imposed by racism and antifeminism.”

“The law cannot do it for us. We must do it for ourselves. We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles, and stereotypes.”

“We must reject the thought of Saint Paul who said, let the woman marry in silence.”

“Black people have freed themselves from the dead weight of the albatross of the Blackness that once hung around their neck. They have done it by picking it up in their arms and holding them out wit...”

“I’m a politician. I detest the word because of the connotation that cling like slime to it. But for want of a better term, I must use it. I have been in politics for twenty years and in that time, ...”

“The question which now faces us is: will women dare in numbers sufficient to have an effect on their own attitude towards themselves and thus change the basic attitudes of males and the general soc...”

“Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Nation, and Sojourner Truth were not evolutionaries, they were revolutionaries, just as many of the young women in today’s society and more and more women must join their r...”

“Frantz Fanon pointed out in Black Skin, White Masks, that the anti-Semitic was eventually the anti-negro. I want to say that eventually both are antifeminist and even further, I want to indicate th...”

“The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. I ask–when is he going to make a Trip to Peking in regard to...”

“A sales tax is the enemy of the poor person. It is the enemy of the elderly couple who live on fixed income. And it is the enemy of the everyday American consumer, poor or not.”

“I am completely opposed to increasing the debt ceiling without basic tax reform. What we need in this country today is leadership which has the courage to call for income tax reform to put the burd...”

“I know a lot of Americans who would be glad to settle for better bus service from their home to their jobs, or from poor neighborhoods to areas of the city where jobs are to be found. Repeated stud...”